Comments on: mea culpa. quechup.com

By: Gary Valan

Gary Valan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:53:33 +0000

Hi Hugh
I signed up as soon as you sent me the invite and my gmail mail list got commandeered by these, sad to say, less than honorable people. I forgot to do my usual due diligence.
Here’s my letter to one of their management types and sorry in advance for a long note:
“Guys
I was invited by a blogging acquaintance, Hugh MacLeod to join your site.
Sadly I did without doing proper due diligence and the iDate owners, marketing geniuses and your software designers, a bunch of bottom feeders-let me be polite and not express my feelings, have serious screwed me over either intentionally or inadvertently. First of all I assumed it was some sort of a social networking site and Quechup turned out to be another spam engine. The fact that I was asked a bunch of personal details should have set off alarm bells but having worked non-stop for 18+ hours I signed on.
I signed up as a heterosexual and most heteros typically would like to meet a WOMAN, unless you play for both teams, which I don’t. So why the heck would you all send it to my entire freaking gmail email list where I have all my professional/business colleagues. And you did not seek my permission either.
This is absolutely unacceptable and if you do not remove my name from your membership rolls and DELETE ALL MY contacts I will inform (whether or not they pay any attention to my email) all the major web 2.0 software review sites including Techcrunch, Gigaom and other even more nastier review sites — its your call. I will do this by
Friday Sept 7th unless you do as I ask and send me mail to confirm that you have deleted my name and my gmail contacts from your database.
Gary Valan”

By: HughC

HughC — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 06:10:53 +0000

Somewhat ironic that I should receive an invite from you since I’ve been banned from commenting on the ‘void for quite some time. Maybe this’ll prove me wrong.
Life’s rich tapestry and all that …

By: Michelle

Michelle — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:13:49 +0000

I aborted the whole thing at registration.. YET… they still spammed hundreds in my contact list. It was very early in the morning, when I opened the email and began registering, perhaps I let something slip but I don’t think so.
Very disappointing and so completely embarassing. I’m not going to beat myself up over it and don’t you either Hugh.

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:53:04 +0000

So you’re human after all?
It got me too. Serves me right for ignoring my instincts. Lesson learned, no real harm, no real foul. What’s a little spam between friends?

By: Silvana

Silvana — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 22:08:37 +0000

You sent me an invitation, I accepted,
they have spam my all contact list I feel really bad.
Should have known better.
Next time i will be very very carefull

By: Richard Hare

Richard Hare — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:40:50 +0000

Oops, they got me too..!

By: Timmy D

Timmy D — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:09:52 +0000

Yeah, I got yours, and checked my contact list and got hit too. Stupid. I really should know better. It’s pretty shifty to spam everyone when all you’re doing is checking your address book for others you know in the system, though.

By: Phil Gomes

Phil Gomes — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 04:03:50 +0000

I got one of these too… Didn’t seem your style.

By: hamish

hamish — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:45:24 +0000

Hmmm. Not only is it embarrassing, although their bad behaviour is not your responsibility, but doesn’t this violate a LOT of European data use laws. They are in general stricter than the the USA equivalents, and I am sure that they have not though about this in detail.
lawyerfest, methinks. (If you are in the UK or Europe…)

By: Michelle Penny

Michelle Penny — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:00:23 +0000

As I was signing up in a bit of a daze this morning I was thinking it all seemed a bit strange. Luckily I popped by your blog just after and cancelled the account.
I wonder how long they will hang on for now…

By: Alex Bellinger

Alex Bellinger — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:19:40 +0000

It’s disgraceful when that happens. Didn’t Adriana suffer the same fate with something similar a while back?
Fortunately I deleted Hugh’s and CC Chapman’s invites to Quetchup because I’m suffering from social network fatigue.
Looking on the bright side — Quetchup must now be officially fucked. They can’t possibly hope to survive this kind of bad publicity.

By: Brian Sexton

Brian Sexton — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 07:36:14 +0000

I am sorry to hear that you got nailed by this, Hugh. This makes me glad to be not into the whole social this-and-that site trend.
I understand why you might want to expose your address book—to search for friends and acquaintances. As a rule, I do not enter anyone else’s e-mail address in any form on any Web site other than an e-mail service (e.g., Gmail) without permission and I cannot recall the last time I made an exception to that rule, but I think I understand what it is you were trying to accomplish by providing your address book to this Web site in this case.
What I do not understand, though, is why you trusted that site or its people—or why you would trust any site or any site’s people, aside from e-mail services (e.g., a service that aggregates e-mail from multiple accounts)—with your e-mail password. What did they do to convince you to entrust such sensitive information? How did they gain that level of trust from you?

By: Marti

Marti — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 07:35:15 +0000

Hell, I was just happy to get mail from you! LOL Hope you have a great week!

By: hugh macleod

hugh macleod — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:12:18 +0000

Thanks for being so kind and supportive, Everybody.
I am still fuming about it, though… [Sigh]

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 04:40:56 +0000

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity…
I signed up to linked in a while back and they gave the option to check my email account to see if any of my contacts were already on linked in — I chose not to give them my email username / password
trust no-one